obama on k street

Frank Rich and Thomas Frank, both excellent on Obama’s failure to “tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over,” as he promised during his campaign. If you read carefully, you’ll see where Rich seems to lift a bit from Frank only to double it down quite nicely – has to do with the poster above.

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Reading the Frank piece, I felt a moment of excitement when I saw ‘And it’s because capital’s main journalistic watchdog seems perfectly content to see politics made into a kind of financial transaction’. Until I noticed the definate article before capital, and remembered I was reading the Wall St. Journal.

But Frank is one of the good guys, even though he writes for the WSJ. Ironically, he’s probably too far left to make it into the NYT – but since the WSJ is definitely not worried about seeming too far left, they give him the “liberal perspective” slot.

He is, and you’re right the NYT would never take him. But the frustration with him is the same that I feel with someone I equally respect, Glenn Greenwald, and indeed with a large segement of the US left in general, and that’s their absolute refusal to look beyond hazy culprits like ‘Republican operatives’ to blame for the deep malaise they find within their state. If only things went back to the way they were when Clinton was ruling, and we were humanitarian bombers, or when Kennedy was ruling and we were anti-communist!